International Rules: From what we saw in the first 10 minutes of this game I think it's fairly obvious that hard questions have to be asked about where the series goes from here, and whether this will kill it off.

The way I saw it, there were two teams involved, and both teams had similar intent from the start. I felt there was a bad undercurrent to the thing from the very beginning.

The Irish definitely aren't blameless here. But what disappointed me as well is the Australians don't need to make this game overly physical. Everybody knew in the physical contest the Irish would come out second best. We did lose some key players early on through injuries and hard tackles, but players want to stand their ground. It's just a pity both teams couldn't just play football.

Instead, the way they got stuck in, both sets of players, made for a very unsavoury afternoon. To be sitting in the stand with so many young people around I felt particular bad to witness such unsportsmanlike behaviour, and that's bound to raise the question of where we go from here.

I still think we should persist with it, for another year at least. But the management and players will have to take more responsibility. Players will just have to abide by the rules. Both sides though have to put their hands up and say they got carried away here, especially the managers, because I felt they were too fired up about the game plan they had going in there.

There are clear rules, and it suits the Irish to obey those rules, and try to play football. Once that physical dimension comes in it's over for us, because we just can't compete with that.

From what I saw the Graham Geraghty tackle was fair enough. I didn't see all that went on before that, but it wasn't as vicious as some of the other things going on in the first quarter. It's incredible to think there wasn't one red card in that game. Two or three red cards early on would have sent out the message. Instead players got away with thuggery.

So the violence we saw here is once again the main story, but we shouldn't let that disguise the fact the Australians have gone way ahead of us, and maybe this is becoming a mismatch. They've mastered it in such as way we just can't compete in any aspect of the game, and maybe that should be our real concern.

I know Seán Boylan scanned the country to get the best players he could, but they were well off the demands of the game. We're inclined to play up our skill factor, that maybe all is fine with our own game, but looking at the Australians here their ball handling and the speed of some of their decisions, physical and mental alertness, and even their kicking, well, they really gave us a lesson in all that.

Part of that comes down to the fact we're still dealing with amateurs against professionals. In the past we were able to compete with Australia because they weren't as adept with the round ball, but they've worked on that to the point where they're controlling it even better than we are. And on many occasions their kicking was superior.

In the past we've had some great exponents of this game - Séamus Moynihan and John McDermott, and Anthony Tohill - and maybe those players just aren't around at the moment. Without blaming anyone, too many of our players kicked away possession, and off the mark, even Steven McDonnell had an off day. We had no obvious target man, were missing a physical presence in the full-forward line. We put a bit of pressure on their kick-outs in the second quarter, but we didn't convert that into scores.

Part of that goes back to the physical element - if the hard tackle is coming in it can unsettle the Gaelic footballer from performing their skills. But we were drained by the third quarter. It used to be the only way we could survive if it's a pure football game, concentrating on skills, but after this I'm not so sure anymore.